The Liberal party has a decision to make: Who’s running the party, Justin Trudeau or Mike Colle’s dead body?

Mr. Colle is the provincial Liberal representative for the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. After learning that Mr. Trudeau had recruited MP Eve Adams from the Conservatives – perhaps the most ill-advised trade since the Senators sent Zdeno Chara to the Bruins – Mr. Colle said what everybody (except apparently Mr. Trudeau and his advisers) knew: it was a dumb thing to do.

“I mean, that a Harper Tory from Mississauga all of a sudden is going to run here in the middle of Toronto with no connections and no awareness? You know, it’s a real insult to the local Liberals in this community,” he said.

He later told the CBC: “You don’t buy into Liberal values in 24 hours… You work, you volunteer in the community, you fight for causes. That’s what makes a Liberal. You don’t buy them at a convenience store, like it seems in this case.”

As for Ms. Adams stated desire to run in Mr. Colle’s riding, that will happen “over my dead body,” he said.

Mr. Colle is a provincial representative, not a federal one, so he’s not bound by Mr. Trudeau’s whims. And he clearly doesn’t share the enthusiasm of his party leader, Premier Kathleen Wynne, who has taken to appearing with Mr. Trudeau at every opportunity. He seems instead to prefer common sense, and a street-level grasp of political sensibilities.

In that he has an advantage over Mr. Trudeau, who, after almost two years as leader, is still making the sort of hamfisted gaffes that saddle the party with people like Ms. Adams. Eglinton-Lawrence already has a candidate for the nomination, lawyer Marco Mendecino, who has signed up hundreds of new members for the party. Mr. Trudeau will now have to either muscle him aside in favour of Ms. Adams – once again violating his “open nomination” policy and upsetting many local Liberals – or explain why he went to the trouble of recruiting her in the first place, only to let her drop off the radar a few months later.

If past practice is followed, he’ll find a way to squeeze out Mr. Mendecino, much as Ms. Wynne did in Sudbury, where the Liberal candidate was summarily jettisoned in favour of an NDP defector in a recent byelection. The Liberals won the byelection, but at the expense of many bruised Liberal followers.

Mr. Trudeau has opted for this route in the past, dictating candidates despite a pledge not to do so. Toronto Central got Chrystia Freeland because Mr. Trudeau’s people made clear they wanted it that way. Trinity-Spadina riding got Adam Vaughan for the same reason. Ottawa-Orleans got Gen. Andrew Leslie over lawyer David Bertschi when Mr. Bertschi’s “green light” was rescinded to ease the way for a Leslie acclamation. Marijuana activist Jody Emery was barred from running in Vancouver, despite Mr. Trudeau’s pro-legalization stand (perhaps to avoid the colourful Ms. Emery from attracting too much attention to the issue). Barj Dhahan, a candidate for the Liberal nomination in Vancouver South, told the CBC he was pressured to withdraw by party officials so they could run a “preferred” candidate.

Dhanah said he was offered another riding, and told he’d be acclaimed as candidate, but rejected the offer because he has lived in Vancouver South for 60 years and wanted to represent a community he knows.

In most of these cases the party leadership has insisted they’re just following standard practice, while painting the losers as whiners and ingrates.

“Any time you have a competitive situation like politics is, there are winners and there are people who don’t win and their supporters can sometimes be very emotional,” Mr. Trudeau said in the case of Mr. Dhahan.

Obviously someone needs to get this message through to Mr. Colle, before he gets too emotional. He appears to remain under the impression that local riding members have a right to run local nominations free from undue interference from party headquarters, or from a leader who wants to parachute in favoured candidates. He may have gotten that impression from Mr. Trudeau himself, who insisted that was the sort of party he planned to run. Silly Mr. Colle. Surely he’s been in politics long enough to know that party leaders often make pledges they don’t intend to keep. Did he think Mr. Trudeau would be different?

It’s been weeks — months even — since I’ve read anyone suggesting Stephen Harper won’t be around for the next election. Somewhere between his trip to Israel, Nelson Mandela’s funeral, public ennui with Mike Duffy and his current high-profile role in supporting Ukraine against Russian threats, Mr. Harper has dragged himself out of the crosshairs of the parliamentary press gallery and moved on to other matters.

Into the breach has stepped Justin Trudeau, who may finally be discovering that actions count as well as words. Mr. Trudeau made a quickie trip to Toronto Thursday to try and quietly calm a storm that has been growing since he set it in motion.

One of the numerous grand promises Mr. Trudeau made on becoming Liberal leader was the pledge to do things differently. No more sneaky backroom shenanigans — only Tories do that. The new improved Trudeau Liberals would be open, honest and accountable. And democratic. Not like Stephen Harper. Mr. Trudeau would be more of a co-ordinator, listening to the party rather than handing down dictates and micromanaging activities.

It’s not quite turning out like that, however. Mr. Trudeau’s hush-hush visit to Toronto’s Trinity-Spadina riding — he didn’t tell the riding president he was coming and there was none of the usual “Justin’s in Town!” welcoming celebration — was an effort to stop an ugly little complaint from getting any uglier.

Morrissey's Canadian fans shouldn't get too hopeful that the Pope of Mope will be crossing their border anytime soonMorrissey's Canadian fans shouldn't get too hopeful that the Pope of Mope will be crossing their border anytime soon.
On Friday, the former Smiths frontman published a paean on his personal website, true-to-you.org, in which he condemned the Canadian government anew for continuing to allow seal hunting, which he calls "greedy and barbaric."
"Canada is a beautiful country, and the people of Canada are good people," Morrissey wrote on his website. "But good people are often ineffectual. Internationally, Canada's sorry image is due entirely to its seal slaughter — which is greedy and barbaric, and it is dismaying to witness such ignorance in 2014."
<blockquote class="pullquote">'Killing baby seals with lightning brutality is now Canada's primary global image'</blockquote>
[caption id="attachment_145978" align="alignright" width="300"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-145978" src="http://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/gail-shea.jpg?w=300&quot; alt="Sean Kipatrick/The Canadian Press" width="300" height="406" /> Sean Kipatrick/The Canadian Press[/caption]
The singer also came out swinging against Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea, attacking the politician for her suggestion that the annual seal hunt is "humane," as harp seals are shot with high-powered rifles.
"Is this a death that Gail Shea would wish for herself?" Morrissey writes."If she considers such butchery to be so 'humane,' why doesn't she place herself amongst the tens of thousands of grey-coated harp seals that will be slaughtered within the next few weeks? She could then test the humane aspect of having her head blown off for herself. Only <em>then</em> could she be thought to speak with any authority on the subject."
The singer, who is vegetarian, goes on to call Canada "regrettably fashionably dead."
"Sound reason tells us that only those of the thinnest intellect wear animal fur," he writes "and because the Canadian government are concerned with animals only economically, killing baby seals with lightning brutality is now Canada's primary global image."
A spokesperson for Shea has responded to Morrissey's statement, saying his comments "<span style="color:#000000;">reveal a total ignorance of the Canadian seal hunt."</span>
"Anyone who takes a careful look at the seal hunt will see that it is humane, sustainable, and well-regulated," minister spokesperson Sophie Doucet said in an email to the <em>Post.</em> "In fact, the process used in the seal hunt was designed by international veterinary experts, and is the most stringent of any wild animal hunt in the world."
<p class="x_MsoNormal" style="color:#000000;">"This is clearly just another case of a millionaire celebrity, desperate for a hobby, shamelessly regurgitating misinformation and myths that fringe animal-rights groups have been pushing for years. In the future, I would urge Mr. Morrissey to consider the impact that his ignorant and inflammatory statements have on the livelihoods of thousands of hard-working men and women in rural communities.”</p>
Morrissey frequently uses his website to voice his opinions on animal welfare, most recently labelling England's Prince William a "thickwit" for embarking on a hunting trip in Spain shortly after making a plea to end the illegal slaughter of endangered animals. The singer has not performed in Canada since 2006, in protest of the annual seal hunt.

Trinity-Spadina is the riding vacated by the NDP’s Olivia Chow so she could run for mayor of Toronto. No byelection has been called but local Liberal hopeful Christine Innes wasn’t letting any grass grow under her feet. In anticipation of Chow’s departure — her plans have hardly been a secret — Innes has been organizing for some time. She announced her candidacy scant hours after Chow resigned. By the next day she was already thanking the Carpenters Union for its endorsement. He husband, Tony Ianno, held the riding until losing to Chow in 2006; Innes ran, and lost, to Chow in 2008 and 2011. The Ianno-Innes’s evidently feel they have a kind of family claim to compete for the Liberal nod.

Her hopes were quickly quashed by an abrupt note from Liberal headquarters. Ontario campaign co-chair David MacNaughton told her she’d been banned from running. Ianno, he alleged, had been accused of bad-mouthing Trudeau favourite Chrystia Freeland and trying to “bully” eager young workers into abandoning Freeland for Innes.

“We’re not going to go back to the days of the Hatfields and McCoys in the Liberal party,” said MacNaughton.

Well. So much for staying out of local campaigns.

Liberal headquarters has tried to position the situation as good news, proof that the old days of internal strife are over. Ianno was a key figure in the wars against Jean Chretien. All Liberals are now expected to play nice and quit knifing one another. Unfortunately, not everyone is buying, perhaps because of the heavy-handed approach that has been used. Why ban a candidate because of something her husband allegedly did, especially in a party that claims to be eager to attract more women contenders? Despite days of complaints, MacNaughton remains unrepentent: “I was given the responsibility for making these judgments and the advice on it. I’ve reviewed it, and that’s the judgment I came to. So that’s that — and it was supported by the national campaign co-chairs. So there we are,” he said Thursday. In other words: Don’t like it? Take a hike.

Innes wants to know what the deal is. She claims the real reason for her banishment is her refusal to accept the special status Trudeau has reserved for Freeland. New electoral boundaries are to take effect for the 2015 election, and Freeland has a friendly riding all picked out. Party bosses wanted Innes’s pledge to pick another location, but she refused. Hence the wrath of Trudeau.

Given Ianno’s history, Liberal headquarters may have a case to make. It clearly sees him as a divisive figure, and a throwback to the past. But its approach flies in the face of the openness Mr. Trudeau promised. And this is not the first time he’s thrown his weight around: Freeland was parachuted into the Toronto Centre byelection with all the pomp and celebration Mr. Trudeau could rouse for her, despite the fact other Liberal figures — most notably former deputy Ontario premier George Smitherman — got the bum’s rush in the process. Mr. Smitherman played the good Liberal and bowed out quietly, but it was clear he’d expected better of Mr. Trudeau.

Mr. Trudeau’s handlers have sought to “clarify” his stand by noting that “non-interference” doesn’t mean a lack of interest. The leader will be free to express his enthusiasm for particular candidates, and to campaign for them if he so chooses. Of course he won’t “force” them on anyone, he’ll just let it be known he really really likes candidate A over candidate B.

Trudeau himself insisted Trinity-Spadina’s nomination remains “open”, just not open to Ms. Innes.

“There were no other candidates willing to go near Trinity-Spadina given the approach that this particular team did,” he said following a speech in Kingston, Ont.

“So, we’re glad to see there’s actually going to be an open nomination now in Trinity-Spadina.”

Not surprisingly, local Liberals are able to see through this rather artful logic. Trudeau’s position equates to this: all nominations will be open, as long as party officials don’t object and Mr. Trudeau doesn’t have a favourite for whom he plans to campaign vigorously. Anyone not quick enough to decipher the message in that stand isn’t bright enough to be in politics in the first place.

Trudeau won’t “force” his favourites on anyone, he’ll just let it be known he really really likes candidate A over candidate B.

So Mr. Trudeau slipped into town to try and sort things out. One prospective candidate, Zach Paikin, son of the well-known broadcaster Steve Paikin, has already dropped his candidacy, accusing Mr. Trudeau of going back on his word. Riding president Julia Metus is livid: “There was absolutely no due or fair process. . . . No one picked up the phone to contact me, there was no opportunity to discuss their concerns, and there was zero local involvement,” she said. Potential NDP candidate Joe Cressy stuck the knife in, noting: “Residents of Trinity-Spadina deserve an MP who will stand up and fight for them, not a political party that is more interested in fighting among themselves.”

Maybe Mr. Trudeau’s easy days are over. His leadership skills, as opposed to his boyish charm, are about to be put to the test.

It’s all about the pantsThe National Post‘s Graeme Hamilton brings welcome news of some backbone — or at least backboney rhetoric — from Quebec Liberal leader Philippe Couillard, who on Wednesday declared himself “fed up” with Premier Pauline Marois presenting “Quebecers as weak, besieged, threatened people. … When it’s not the federal government, it’s the other provinces. When it’s not the federal government or the other provinces, it is foreigners who come to live here. And when it’s not the foreigners living here, it is us,” he thundered. “Quebecers who don’t think like them. I’m fed up with that, and it’s going to end with this election.”

Bravo, sir. Shame about the months of waffling leading up to it. And when it comes to the “values charter” specifically, nobody seems to think the Liberals are preparing to fight on that ground anyway. “Their slogan calls for taking care of ‘real things,’ which means ‘avoid the charter,'” Pierre Martin writes in the Toronto Star. “The challenge for the Liberals is to avoid losing the support of francophone federalists who are tempted to vote for the PQ because they approve of the charter.” Without arguing its merits and demerits. We’re not totally sure how they pull that off.

Make no mistake: “This election is about pants,” the Montreal Gazette‘s Don Macpherson writes — specifically “the pants that Parti Québécois minister Bernard Drainville said the Marois minority government was putting on when it refused to compromise on its proposed anti-hijab ‘charter of values.'” And now, as Macpherson says, francophone Quebecers “have the opportunity to put on their pants, too”: either “to put the province’s minorities in their place, and show them who’s boss,” or to decide that they don’t think a surgeon should lose his job for wearing a turban, which polls consistently show is the case, and vote accordingly. What a joy it would be if this thing blew up in Marois’ face.

To that end, Tasha Kheiriddin, writing in the Post, suggests Couillard “turn Marois’ election gambit on its head” by focusing on “real issues” of inequality: “female genital mutilation, forced marriage and honour crimes,” for example. “Banning headscarves will not help one victim of domestic abuse, nor one girl forced into a union against her consent,” she argues. “But more rigorous prosecution of crimes and more resources to help women flee abusive situations will.” True enough. But we’re not sure reminding Quebecers of female genital mutilation, forced marriages and honour crimes is going to calm fears about the supposed Muslim menace.

In Le Devoir, Bernard Descôteaux argues any majority government is preferable to another minority outcome and the political “paralysis” that comes with it. But he says the PQ has been too all over the place on policy to deserve the benefit of the doubt just yet: Voters need absolute clarity on what Marois intends to do with language laws and exactly what the final version of her secularism charter is going to look like, he argues.

Oh right, and the sovereignty thing. “If [Marois] does win a majority next month, her base will expect nothing less than an all-out government effort to secure the winning conditions for another referendum,” writes the Star‘s Chantal Hébert. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: The Bloc Québécois was in as good shape heading into the 2011 federal election as the PQ is now, she notes. At some point, Vincent Marissal observes in La Presse, voters will ask themselves the “inevitable question: … Is a vote for the PQ a vote for sovereignty?” If they conclude it is, Hébert suggests it could help the opposition: As we saw with the Orange Wave, Quebecers are increasingly rejecting politics divided along that particular line.

André Pratte says all La Presse wants is a sober, honest and policy-rich debate on how Quebec can build a “dynamic economy” that’s attractive to private investors and a health-care system that’s cost-effective and doesn’t leave senior citizens languishing on gurneys in hallways; and achieve “sound public finances” and “a population united in common goals.” We fear they may be disappointed.

The Gazette‘s editorialists remind us that under a law passed by Marois’ government, the next provincial election must be held Oct. 3, 2016. Oh, well. Quebec has balanced budget legislation too, you know! The Post‘s John Ivison updates us on developments in Scotland’s push for sovereignty, and the lessons its referendum process could offer us should we ever have to slog down that road again.

Provincial affairsPostmedia’s Andrew Coyne suggests we reflect for a moment on Industry Minister James Moore’s and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s reactions to Chrysler turning down $700-million in government investment: “The first reaction of the people entrusted to look after our money, having been informed a chronic corporate sponger, still into the taxpayer for nearly $1-billion, had withdrawn what it now admits was an entirely baseless request for hundreds of millions more, was to try to persuade it to reconsider.” It’s not hard to see why: How else will they get to take credit for the jobs? But perhaps we might pause to consider what this says about the necessity of corporate welfare in the first place.

The Post‘s Scott Stinson charts the Ontario NDP’s continuing slide into dumb-dumb populism: Now they want to give everyone $100 because hydro rates are too high, and instead of selling excess power supply to neighbouring jurisdictions at a loss they seem to want to recoup nothing at all.

The Calgary Herald‘s Licia Corbella brings us all sides of the ridiculous story of the Calgary school bus driver who was fired for picking up some of her charges in a personal vehicle sooner than let them freeze solid on the roadside.

Duly notedWhile the usual cast of “reliably disgruntled former ambassadors” laments Canada’s black-and-white approach to the Ukrainian situation, Terry Glavin, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, thinks “events have vindicated Canada’s refreshingly militant support for Ukraine’s embattled democrats.” And if you don’t want to take his word for it, you could take that of Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland, who told CBC this week “there’s no dissent between me and the Liberal party and the prime minister and the foreign minister on Ukraine right now.”

Novice Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland was a guest on CTV’s Power Play on Wednesday and was clearly getting on the nerves of Conservative MP James Bezan, who was there to defend his leader’s decision to keep Liberals and New Democrats off a high-profile mission to Ukraine.

Both Freeland and Bezan are Canadians with Ukrainian heritage. Freeland reportedy co-owns an apartment overlooking the square that has been the centre of Kyiv’s battleground. She thinks opposition members should be aboard Foreign Minister John Baird’s plane as an expression of pan-Canadian sympathy. As Freeland pressed her case Bezan fidgeted painfully, eventually turning away with an eye-roll to mutter a frustrated “Oh Jeez.”

Freeland has only been an MP for a few weeks and evidently hasn’t been fully trained in the standard robo-tron approach to public appearances, in which the party line is spouted like cultists chanting their mantra. She kept getting passionate. “I have to say as a Canadian member of Parliament, as a Canadian Ukrainian who has been working on Ukrainian issues for more than 20 years, am really ashamed about the way the deaths of Ukrainians…are being turned into this cheap partisan football,” she said.

Oh Jeez.

Freeland’s fervour can be appreciated, as can her eagerness to pledge solidarity with the courageous Ukrainians who faced down their corrupt government and the bully-boy Russian president who stood behind it. But the partisan football on this one has been flying all over the field. Her own leader, Justin Trudeau, did a good job of turning a serious affair into an embarrassing blunder when he tried to link Russia’s anger to its hockey defeat at the Olympics. Then it took him two days to admit the gaffe and apologize, and only after being taken to task by a contemptuous Ukraine ambassador. The PMO’s response, when contacted by CTV over the seating plan for Baird’s mission, was that both the Liberals and NDP had rendered themselves unworthy to attend by their amateurish approach to a serious issue.

Yes, it would have been nice for Stephen Harper to have offered them seats on the plane, as he did for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, but as Bezan pointed out when he was allowed to get a word in, “this is government mission” in which Baird will be meeting those Ukrainians now trying to work their way towards a stable government. It’s not a chance for selfies and swaying to the music, as took place at the Mandela funeral. “This is about showing that the Government of Canada…has stood with Ukraine right from the get-go.”

The Liberals have been boasting recently about their newfound prowess as fundraisers. Thanks to their close study of methods used by the Conservatives and U.S. Democrats, the money is finally pouring in. Presuming they don’t take their cue on travel planning from Alberta Premier Alison Redford, they should easily be able to afford a few tickets to Ukraine and back. It’s not the responsibility of the Prime Minister to help keep Liberal expenses down, nor is he required to take his opponents along whenever he or one of his ministers sets off to do business with other leaders. As Bezan pointed out, the partisan football flies both ways.

Related

Trudeau has gone to some effort to recruit potential star candidates, people of intellectual heft and sterling economic credentials whose presence on the Liberal team he hopes will dispel qualms about his fitness to be prime minister.

And he’s making no secret that he’d like them to win their respective nominations.

“He is going out and recruiting people to be part of that team … and I don’t think it’s unusual for him to say, ‘I hope this person runs and I want that person in the caucus,”‘ said Broadhurst.

“But he’s been exceedingly clear with all of them that there is a first step in the process and it’s you go to your local community and you get their support to be the candidate.”

“I don’t think there is a problem with him having a preference,” Broadhurst added, “as long as that preference doesn’t in any way impact the way we run those (nomination) races.”

He said no one is more committed to wide open, fair nomination contests than Trudeau.

Some of the star recruits have been showcased at the Liberal convention, given prominent roles as keynote speakers, panellists and even as co-chairs of the gathering.

Retired general Andrew Leslie, who is expected to run in Ottawa-Orleans and has been named a special adviser to Trudeau on military and foreign affairs, took his star turn with a well-received keynote speech Friday. When it was over, Trudeau mounted the stage to give him a big hug.

On Saturday, the lineup of speakers included Jim Carr, former president of the Business Council of Manitoba; Bill Morneau, Toronto-based head of the country’s largest human resources consulting company and chair of the C.D. Howe Institute; and Jody Wilson-Raybould, Assembly of First Nations regional chief for British Columbia.

Trudeau bounded on stage to hug Wilson-Raybould and Morneau at the conclusion of their speeches. And it was announced that Morneau has joined Trudeau’s economic advisory council, along with previous star recruit Chrystia Freeland, who won a Toronto byelection late last year.

Wilson-Raybould and another prospective member of team Trudeau — Chima Nkemdirim, chief of staff to Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi — are co-chairing the convention.

Some supporters of other would-be candidates are fuming over what they perceive as the leader tilting the nomination playing field to favour his hand-picked stars.

For instance, some Manitoba delegates are privately seething over the attention lavished on Carr, who intends to run in Winnipeg South Centre. That’s the same riding where Karen Taraska-Alcock, a businesswoman, longtime party activist and widow of former MP Reg Alcock, is seeking the nomination.

They grumble that the leader’s apparent preference for Carr is poor thanks for Taraska-Alcock co-chairing Trudeau’s leadership campaign in the province and incompatible with his vow to field more female candidates.

Taraska-Alcock herself shrugs.

“It doesn’t bother me,” she said in an interview. “You know, campaigns are going to be won on the ground and we’ve got a very good, healthy group of people on the ground.”

She said it’s good for the riding to have a competitive nomination race, adding that she respects the fact that Carr, a former provincial MLA, has “come back after such a long absence from the party to run.”

Taraska-Alcock also said she’s seen no evidence that Trudeau is trying to orchestrate a Carr victory.

“He has been really committed to a positive approach and no more old boy, backroom style politics and I have to take him at his word.”

For his part, Carr said he expects the nomination contest to be “vigorous.”

Broadhurst doubted that a prominent role at the convention will give much of a leg up to any of the so-called stars.

“I think people vastly over-estimate the value in a local nomination race of getting 15 minutes on the stage at national convention. It’s still, at the end of the day, going to be about selling memberships and pulling the vote and I don’t think anybody who appeared on stage today was selling a membership while they were doing it.”

At the same time the convention is being used to promote Trudeau’s star recruits, insiders say behind the scenes pressure is being applied to dissuade a raft of former MPs from trying to make a comeback. As much as possible, Trudeau wants to surround himself in the 2015 campaign with fresh faces, a team untainted by past internal feuds or election losses.

“There’s definitely an effort in this recruitment to get faces that aren’t necessarily the common faces,” said Broadhurst.

“We don’t want to run the best slate of candidates for 1997. We want to run the best slate of candidates for 2015.”

As Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier said in 1918, love is better than hate. And as NDP leader Jack Layton very similarly wrote in his farwell letter nearly a century later, love is better than anger.

But is it always? Here are 10 moments from the recent by-election campaigns that would seem to indicate that, at least in the minds of some, hate and anger may be the better way to go.

There are no innocents in politics of course. Liberals have been no stranger to the hard negative attack ad — they even lost my vote one election over an ad I felt was way over the line. Here’s all I ask though: don’t claim to be holier than thou when you’re in the mud with everyone else.

Was Laurier (and, a century later, Layton) really right though? We leave it to you to decide.

1. Your leader is stupid

The tone for the NDP campaign in Toronto-Centre was set early, at the nomination meeting. Linda McQuaig, who would go on to be the candidate, told attendees that, unlike Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has substance and brains. The NDP would often return to this “Trudeau is a brainless simpleton” theme during the weeks to come.

2. Go home you carpetbagger

Apparently having been such big fans of the way the Conservatives attacked Michael Ignatieff for daring to be internationally successful, Chrystia Freeland was attacked by the NDP for having had a successful career outside of Canada before returning to Toronto, where her daughter was born, to run for public office. NDP/Tory, same old story? While they managed to not completely ape the Conservative talking points – no reports of “she didn’t come back for you” quotes – it was a slap in the face to the thousands in the community who have lived elsewhere.

3. Your house is too nice

When Freeland bought a home in the community of Summerhill, the NDP pounced. Did they say the $1.275 million price tag, for which Freeland took out a substantial mortgage and needed a parental co-sign, was a sign housing prices are too high for many families? No, they attacked Freeland as a richy rich who bought a fancy house. Of course, their class warfare ignored that McQuaig lives just down the street. And when McQuaig’s former home – worth many times more than that after extensive renovations – was mentioned later in the campaign, they decried this irrelevant personal attack. Sadly, irony may well be dead.

4. You didn’t single-handedly stop the global decline of the media industry

The NDP similarly jumped on a report that, when Freeland was a mid-level manager at Reuters, a number of people in a Toronto division she oversaw were laid-off. Never mind the fact that the layoffs weren’t her decision, as the article noted; never mind the fact media organizations around the world are shedding staff as they struggle to adjust to a fragmenting audience, the Internet and new business models. No, somehow, they contended, a mid-level manager at a media conglomerate should have been able to single-handedly reverse the global decline of the media industry. If she couldn’t save their jobs, how can she save yours, and so on.

*This may not actually be a hate-is-better moment; the NDP may actually think this is how the economy works.

5. You’re not entitled to Tom Mulcair’s entitlements

When Emmanuel Dubourg resigned from Quebec’s National Assembly to run for the Liberal nomination in Bourassa, he was entitled to a severance package, which he accepted. Every resigning MNA has the same entitlement. This became a prime attack point for NDP candidate Stephane Moraille, who plastered the riding with negative signs showing Dubourg and Trudeau, surrounded by what the kids call bling. They would prefer that you ignore the fact that NDP leader Tom Mulcair, when his term ended as an MNA, took the same payment. Just two months later, he was an NDP candidate in Outremont. Do as I say, not as my leader does?

6. I’m gonna poke your eye with a stick; don’t swat it away

I’m sure there were Moraille signs around Bourassa, but I’m told those negative Dubourg signs were everywhere — including one on a lamp post right in front of Dubourg’s campaign office. Now, putting up a sign – let alone a negative attack sign – in front of your opponent’s office is kind of a bush-league move to begin with. But here’s how the NDP tried to manufacture a story: they put up the sign, then staked it out from a car across the street, video camera at the ready. When Dubourg’s campaign manager called Moraille’s office to request they remove the sign as a courtesy, they kept him on hold for nearly an hour, and then took a message. Several more messages weren’t returned. When the Liberals finally removed the sign, the NDP taped it, anonymously uploaded the video to YouTube, and received anonymity when tipping the press to the video. They then went on to denounce the Liberals were for removing the sign. I’m not sure if the calls ever got returned.

7. Sign here, whether it’s true or not

Concerned at polling that showed the Conservative stronghold of Brandon-Souris was at risk to Liberal candidate Rolf Dinsdale, the party took the unprecedented step of having a sitting Prime Minister wade into a byelection campaign. And they certainly didn’t take the high road. In a letter delivered to every resident of the riding, Harper lashed out at Trudeau, distorting his policy on marijuana legalization (which will actually make it harder for children to access the drug and choke off a major revenue source for organized crime) and also claiming Trudeau has promised to revive the long gun registry when, in fact, Trudeau – to some controversy during the leadership campaign – promised to do the very opposite.

8.But were you really bullied?

It was auspicious timing – right around anti-bullying week, at a time the government was introducing anti-cyber bullying legislation. The Conservative candidate in Provencher, Ted Falk, took the opportunity to question whether an area high school student, who is openly gay, was taunted during his efforts to start a gay-straight alliance at his high school. Apparently the fact the bullying was caught by CBC cameras wasn’t enough to convince Falk, who said he couldn’t rule the possibility that the claim was fabricated to help efforts to start the student club. Falk refused to apologize.

9. I only want to debate the candidate I want to debate

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joZmDTX5CNc&w=640&h=390]

There were 11 candidates on the ballot in Toronto-Centre, but McQuaig wanted to sideline nine of them to debate the only one she seemed to think mattered – Freeland – on income inequality. Might be fun if they were both just two authors pushing books, but as this was an election, not a book tour, Freeland rightly declined – she would only participate in debates involving all the candidates. You know who would have disliked McQuaig’s solo debate challenge? Jack Layton. When Harper tried to sideline Layton and go mano-a-mano with Michael Ignatieff in 2011, Layton called it anti-democratic.

10. You’re not Canadian enough to have an opinion

When Mulcair made national unity a by-election issue by telling a Montreal audience he would “wipe the floor” with Trudeau over Liberal support of the Clarity Act and refusal to accept that a vote of 50 per cent plus one would be enough to break up the country, the topic was naturally brought up in the campaign. When Steve Paikin raised it during a TVO debate, Freeland questioned the NDP position. McQuaig, though, didn’t want to hear it. “I’m not going to take lectures on this from somebody who hasn’t even been in the country…” she told Freeland. Even Conservative candidate Geoff Pollock, who spent much of the campaign telling people to vote NDP, was appalled. I’ll let Freeland have the last word: “Who is allowed to be part of the debate? … What about someone who just became a Canadian citizen yesterday? Do you say actually you’re not allowed to have an opinion on Quebec?…Or allowed to have an opinion in discussion with Linda?”

The federal Liberals won the closely watched byelection in Toronto Centre last night, part of a trend that saw Justin Trudeau’s party hold ridings in Quebec and Ontario while dramatically increasing their vote share in two Manitoba races.

Former journalist Chrystia Freeland received more than 49% of the vote, which allowed her to pull away from the NDP’s Linda McQuaig (36.4%), who was ahead after early results trickled in. The Freeland win was a considerable relief for Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals, who have held the downtown Toronto riding since 1993. It opened up when former party leader Bob Rae retired from politics.

“We stayed positive, we stayed focused on what the people of Toronto Centre wanted,” Ms. Freeland told supporters last night, blasting the NDP for a campaign that levelled “personal attacks” on her and “attempted to divide” the riding’s poor neighbourhoods from its wealthy residents.

Elsewhere across the country, the Liberals won an easy victory in the Quebec riding of Bourassa, with Emmanuel Dubourg beating the NDP’s Stéphane Moraille by 16 points. The riding was previously held by Liberal Denis Coderre, who is now the Mayor of Montreal. And in the Manitoba riding of Provencher, previously held by the Tories and former cabinet minister Vic Toews, the Conservative candidate Ted Falk won easily. Mr. Falk received more than 58% of the vote to 29.9% for Liberal Terry Hayward.

The Manitoba riding of Brandon-Souris remained too close to call until after midnight, with Liberal Rolf Dinsdale and Conservative Larry Maguire trading the lead back and forth through the night as results trickled in. In the end Mr. Maguire won with 44.1% of the vote compared to 42.7% for Mr. Dinsdale. The riding had been a safe Tory seat, and in the 2011 general election the Liberals had only managed 5% of the vote there.

National Post GraphicsCLICK TO ENLARGE.

It was the race in Toronto Centre, though, that had garnered a lot of attention. From the outset, the performance of the candidate representing the governing party was merely a secondary storyline. Though the riding had been held by the Tories in the past, including a decade-long stretch when David Crombie was MP in the 1980s, it had been solidly Liberal since 1993, and the Conservatives were a distant third in the 2011 general election.

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Lawyer Geoff Pollock, carrying the Conservative banner this time around, repeatedly stressed the Harper government’s record on the economy and did his best to promote the benefits of the recent Canada-EU trade deal. It was perhaps too macro a message for a byelection, which are often focused on local issues, and coming amid ongoing fallout over the Senate expense scandal, Mr. Pollock never polled higher than a distant third in this race, and he finished with less than 9% support last night.

That left the field clear for a showdown between Ms. Freeland and Ms. McQuaig, two accomplished journalists and authors who had both made income inequality a focus of some of their recent work. And though the Liberals are the third-place party in the House of Commons, the Toronto Centre race presented a particular risk to Mr. Trudeau. Though he didn’t appoint Ms. Freeland or overrule the local riding association, he made it known that she was his preferred choice, and the former Reuters manager was named to his economic council almost as soon as she put her name forward to run in the byelection.

A Liberal failure to hold a seat they have represented for two decades, and with a candidate that had already been elevated to Mr. Trudeau’s inner circle, would have in the least dented the narrative that the party was resurgent under their still-new leader, and that his personal popularity would overcome the challenges faced by his relatively untested team.

As a zealot and a dreamer, Assange does not concern himself with the mundane realities of how organizations actually work in the real world<span style="font-size:small;">One of Julian Assange’s early master-strokes was the name he chose for his organization, “WikiLeaks.” When people think “wiki,” they think Wikipedia, the online, volunteer-edited encyclopedia that everyone finds so astonishingly useful. It’s a great brand.</span>
In fact, the early editors of WikiLeaks encouraged everyone to draw this connection — despite the fact that the two sites are unaffiliated. “To the user, WikiLeaks will look very much like Wikipedia,” Assange told readers. “Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it … Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications.”
<blockquote class="pullquote">Despite his anarcho-utopian rhetoric, Assange always has had the final say on WikiLeaks content</blockquote>
It was a utopian vision: Assange’s WikiWarriors would comprise a noble truth-seeking collective, tethered together by a shared desire to liberate information from our corporate and governmental overlords, and empowered by WikiLeaks’ anonymizing technology.
But this crowd-sourcing management model didn’t work. Or, at least, is didn’t work the way Assange wanted. Despite his anarcho-utopian rhetoric, he always has had the final say on WikiLeaks content. In 2010, Assange centralized the site’s editorial policies. It was around this time that Assange’s embittered right-hand man, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, left the organization, along with many of WikiLeaks’ early volunteers.
[ooyala code="RyZTI5ZTpOvUJLVR5DPbU8JqjkwhQ-9b" player_id="29345e61bd154274ae9287c2b0ea4fe2"]
In his angry 2011 tell-all, Inside WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg depicted his one-time boss as a sort of narcissistic would-be prophet figure. Assange was inspiring and charming when followers listened to his instructions. But he became psychotic-seeming when his WikiLeaks minions displeased him. Domscheit-Berg reports in his book that Assange often would shriek at him during these dark periods. (“If you f--k up, I will hunt you down and kill you,” is one example that Domscheit-Berg provides.) <em>The Fifth Estate</em>, DreamWorks’ new film about WikiLeaks, is based in part on Domscheit-Berg’s scathing book — which helps explain why WikiLeaks has been using every propaganda mechanism at its disposal, including the group’s Twitter feed, to attack the film and its allegedly “distorted” agenda.
I can’t say if all of Domscheit-Berg’s claims are true. But the book has the ring of truth. Certainly, Assange does see himself in an unsettlingly grandiose way.
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A turgid manifesto he produced in 2006, the same year WikiLeaks published its first documents, describes his project in good-versus-evil messianic terms. The world, as Assange described it, is bedeviled by “authoritarian conspiracies.” But WikiLeaks will smash this dark plot: “We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.” The site’s logo features an hourglass, with a darkened graphic of planet Earth filtering downward into a lighter, purified mirror image of itself.
And yet it must be said that, for all of Assange’s megalomania, he truly has transformed the way information is shared. Until WikiLeaks came along, most journalists got their scoops the old-fashioned way — drop by drop, document by document. Assange wanted to add orders of magnitude to this process. And he did.
[caption id="attachment_21840" align="alignright" width="300"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-21840" alt="Paul Hackett / Reuters" src="http://nationalpostarts.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/julian1.jpg?w=300&quot; width="300" height="225" /> Paul Hackett / Reuters[/caption]
In 2010 and 2011, at its high-profile peak, WikiLeaks was publishing hundreds of thousands of documents at a time, many of them related to sensitive aspects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point, the site published a batch of 5 million emails from Stratfor, a self-described “geopolitical intelligence firm.” This single doc-dump contained more information that any one human being could possibly review in a lifetime.
Some WikiLeaks scoops shone a light onto genuine malfeasance by powerful state and corporate actors. In one case, WikiLeaks released the guidebook for the operation of Guantanamo prison camp — which noted the appalling fact that some detainees were being shielded from Red Cross scrutiny, something the U.S. military had lied about in the past. In another case, WikiLeaks-released documents suggested that the United States had overlooked evidence of torture in Iraqi prisons.
<blockquote class="pullquote">As a zealot and a dreamer, Assange does not concern himself with the mundane realities of how organizations actually work in the real world</blockquote>
But in its puritanical zeal to disclose information, WikiLeaks often was reckless. Most of the newsworthy documents the site has published have little to do with official malfeasance, but rather simply contained embarrassing details about legitimate governance and diplomatic operations. In his manifestos, Assange rhapsodizes about a world of perfect transparency. But of course, it is impossible for any large organization — especially one such as a Western government, which is responsible for law enforcement and the military protection of the citizenry — to function without privileging some information as classified. As a zealot and a dreamer, Assange does not concern himself with the mundane realities of how organizations actually work in the real world, which helps explain why WikiLeaks itself has been so internally dysfunctional.
When Assange has offered praise for any national government, it has tended to be those such as Sweden, Iceland and Switzerland, because of the high value they place on information freedom, privacy and anonymity. But it is no coincidence that these states also happen to be small, extremely liberal countries with little in the way of geopolitical security responsibilities. It’s easy to create a hacker’s paradise if you’re letting the United States and other major Western powers worry about the next 9/11.
Assange’s radical vision sounds appealing to a young generation that believes “information wants to be free.” But in truth, a world with no secrets at all might be just as dangerous and frightening as one with too many.<span style="font-size:small;">Reckless WikiWarriors</span>:

For the NDP, Ms. McQuaig won a hotly contested nomination, and with a high profile of her own she represented a chance to solidify the party’s grip on downtown Toronto — it already holds the ridings to the west and east of Toronto Centre. Ms. McQuaig campaigned on the position that only her party was the true alternative to the Conservatives, arguing that problems such as the lack of affordable housing in the riding were the result of years of mistakes made by successive Liberal and Conservative governments.

The NDP campaign also sought to exploit Ms. Freeland’s time spent working overseas as a journalist — in an echo of the criticism the Tories levelled at then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff — with Ms. McQuaig emphasizing her deep roots in the riding. “For Toronto. From Toronto,” read her campaign literature.

Now that Ms. Freeland has overcome such parochialism, she and the rest of the Liberal brain trust will have to develop some sort of economic plan that addresses what she considers the crisis of a struggling middle class with actual tangible ideas, and opposed to sound bites and talking points. As with Mr. Trudeau, Ms. Freeland says the problems facing the middle class are significant, but also like her party leader, there has been little detail provided on how a Liberal government would approach the economy differently.

In a piece she wrote for The Atlantic magazine that was published last week titled “Is Capitalism in Trouble?”, Ms. Freeland hinted at why her party hasn’t yet unveiled a list of actionable promises. “Solutions to the problems of the middle class are neither obvious nor easy,” she wrote.

That’s probably not a statement that will make it to the Liberal election platform.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris YoungLiberal Candidate Chrystia Freeland, right, stands with Bob Rae as she celebrates after winning the Toronto Centre Federal byelection in Toronto on Monday Nov. 25, 2013.

Michelle Siu for National PostLeft to right: Moderator and radio personality John Tory, along with Conservative candidate Geoff Pollock, NDP candidate Linda McQuaig, Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland, and Green party candidate John Deverell, during the all-candidates debate for the Toronto Centre federal byelection in Toronto on Nov 20, 2013.

Monday’s four federal by-elections – Bourassa in Montreal, Toronto Centre, Provencher and Brandon-Souris in Manitoba – are a bellwether; the most important indicator we’ve had, since the previous round in November of 2012, of who’s doing well and who isn’t, in Ottawa.

It will be the first major electoral test of Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader; the first vote we’ve seen since the Senate spending scandal rocked the Harper Conservative government back on its heels; and the first telltale of whether NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s powerful performances in the House of Commons, since last June, can translate into votes.

Here’s what’s curious: Trudeau is in contention to win three of these four ridings.

If the polls are anything close to accurate – which is a substantial “if,” admittedly – the Liberals will win Bourassa by a comfortable margin; Toronto Centre by a smaller one; come a close second in Brandon-Souris, or win it by a nose in an upset; and lose Provencher to the Conservatives. For Trudeau, anything less than two wins (Toronto Centre and Bourassa) would be a rebuke; three wins (adding Brandon-Souris) would be a big victory.

For the New Democrats, a win in Toronto Centre would be huge – catapulting their star candidate there, Linda McQuaig, into a leading role at NDP leader Thomas Mulcair’s side, and dealing a grave setback to Trudeau via the loss of his own star candidate, Chrystia Freeland. For Trudeau likewise Toronto Centre is a must-win; not only is Freeland already a key member of his team, but the seat has long been a Liberal enclave, having previously been occupied by former Liberal leader Bob Rae.

The Conservatives, for their part, must retain Provencher by a comfortable margin, and hang onto Brandon-Souris by hook or by crook, or be deemed the losers of the hour. Any loss for them in Manitoba would be interpreted to be a direct result of the Senate scandal, and a harbinger of a collapsing Western base. Cue more backroom leadership machinations, and more open speculation about a career change for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, before rather than after, the 2015 election.

It’s all deeply fascinating to partisans, politicos and journalists. Everything but the top-line result – who wins, who loses – will likely be lost on most voters beyond the four ridings themselves. But whatever the outcome this question remains germane: How is it that Trudeau, still new in the job, still suffering from occasional foot-in-mouth disease, holding just 34 Commons seats, and lacking a detailed policy platform (though he has sketched out his direction in broad terms) is even in contention?

Smart strategic positioning has played a part. The Liberals are re-straddling the centre, especially on the resource file, which is creating opportunities for Trudeau. But the bigger part of the answer, it seems to me, is this: the Conservatives and New Democrats are helping him.

For Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the turning points have been obvious; the reset-that-was-not-a-reset last summer, whereby the cabinet was shuffled and new members added, with zero moderation in tactics or tone; the missed opportunity to bring new blood into the PMO (rather than promote only insiders and loyalists, as Harper has done); the missed opportunity to use the August summer Arctic tour as a “charm offensive;” and the myriad neglected chances, since the Senate spending scandal broke last May 14, to get out front of the bad news rather than be battered by a series of brutally damaging revelations from the media and the Mounties, as occurred again last week.

Conservative tactics in the House of Commons – essentially to never apologize, never explain, rarely answer and always attack, while routinely misrepresenting opponents’ positions – have gone from bad to worse in the new session. The odious practice of routinely using omnibus legislation to ram unrelated measures through parliament, which drew so much fire in 2012, continues apace with Justice Minister Peter MacKay’s “cyber-bullying” bill.

Mulcair, for his part, continues to torpedo his own boat, even as he performs very well in the House, first by campaigning against the Keystone XL pipeline – symbolic shorthand for “I don’t understand basic economics and couldn’t care less about the West” – and by resurrecting his bizarre plan to rip up the federal Clarity Act. In Quebec, backing “50 per cent plus one” to break up the country may be a wash or a slight political plus, in soft nationalist ridings. In federalist ridings and everywhere outside Quebec it’s Kryptonite for Mulcair, and a huge boost for Trudeau.

In sum, the Conservatives seem hell-bent on reinforcing their negatives with excessive central control and strident partisanship; the New Democrats seem bent on reinforcing theirs, with economic wonkiness and pandering to Quebec nationalists. Is it any wonder then, that the Grits continue to float in the mid-thirties in popular support, compared to the high twenties for the Conservatives and low twenties for the NDP, seemingly unrelated to anything that occurs in the House of Commons?

It’s no surprise at all. Trudeau’s rivals are doing his work – handing him lay-ups, before he utters a word.

There are four candidates in the much-watched Toronto Centre contest, one of four federal byelections Monday. But two of them are Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland — celebrity authors and thinkers who have turned the race into a two-woman battle over a shared pet issue: income inequality. Ms. McQuaig, for the NDP, and the Liberal Ms. Freeland have different prescriptions, and agreed to debate the issue (and others) this week with Financial Post Editor Terence Corcoran:

Terence Corcoran: Let’s get straight to the point. Both of you have written books that to varying degrees engage in class warfare. But income inequality and a declining middle class are ideological myths. Toronto Centre is a case in point: Rising middle class in Distillery District and other areas, burgeoning immigrant community in St. James Town and Regent Park, wealthy Rosedale. It’s beautiful! It works! Where is the problem?

Linda McQuaig: Boy, aren’t you out of touch? Maybe that’s how life looks from your National Post office. But out there, going door-to-door in downtown Toronto, it doesn’t look nearly as rosy as you paint it. Yes, much of it works, but there’s also a lot of suffering. I hear from people with several part-time jobs with no benefits or security — struggling to live in inadequate housing. We’re seeing deteriorating conditions that are undermining our democracy. We don’t want to go further down the path of inequality as the U.S. has and end up with gated communities next to people living in abject poverty. Do you not agree?

Chrystia Freeland: While Linda has made the case for class warfare in pitting Rosedale against Regent Park, I am in favour of using the market to address the very real issues facing the middle class in Toronto Centre. Youth unemployment in Toronto is at its highest rate in decades at 18%, which is proving particularly difficult for young people in places like St. James Town and Regent Park. Things are not working and it’s certainly not beautiful.

I hear about it at many doors I go to, often from mothers who are worried about the job prospects for their children. I also talk to young graduates, from every part of this diverse riding, who are unable to find a steady job and jump from short-term job to job without any stability or security. This is something we need to urgently address.

Corcoran: When I said Toronto Centre is “beautiful” I didn’t mean perfect. Inequality is part of life, and life is an ongoing dynamic struggle. Knock on any door and you find a struggle of some kind. Aren’t both of you exploiting these struggles with unfulfillable promises such as national housing strategies, national urban transit strategies, national infrastructure programs, national pension expansions and other programs?

McQuaig: Who says we can’t afford these programs? We get richer every year as a country — and yet we’re told we have to do with less. We used to have a successful housing program. We used to be better at funding transit and pensions. Now Harper Conservatives are happy to spend massive amounts of money on prisons, fighter jets, and across-the-board corporate tax cuts. It’s a question of priorities.
Yes, inequality is a part of life — but it has reached destructive levels.

Freeland: Of course inequality is part of life, but today’s hollowing out of the middle class is something new. Over the past 30 years, the Canadian economy has more than doubled, while median wages have increased by less than 15%. That’s not how the economy worked in the post-war era, when increases in GDP fed directly into rising incomes for the broad Canadian middle.

Fixing things will be difficult, but we’ve risen to greater challenges in the past and we can do it again. We can do so again, particularly given the fact that we are living in a time of unprecedentedly low inflation and interest rates, and abundant local capital seeking investable projects.

Michelle Siu for National PostLinda McQuaig (L) and Chrystia Freeland take part in the all-candidates debate for the Toronto Centre federal by-election in Toronto on Nov. 20, 2013.

Corcoran: The Harper Tories claim to be champions of corporate and personal tax cuts. From what I’ve seen, as Liberal and NDP candidates, the two of you are waffling on tax increases. Should new corporate, income, consumption or carbon taxes be imposed on Canadians?

McQuaig: Both the Liberals and Conservatives have relied on cutting corporate taxes in the name of job creation. But we haven’t seen the jobs. Since 2000 the corporate tax rate has been cut in half from 29% to 15%. But corporations haven’t invested that money in job creation. As former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney acknowledged, many corporations have been sitting on $500-billion of “dead money” instead of investing it in Canada.

The NDP would restore higher corporate tax rates to raise badly needed revenue while keeping Canadian rates competitive with U.S. and other G7 nations. This would restore the fiscal capacity of the government to help people and make the tax system fairer. Any future corporate tax credit should be directly linked to job creation.

Freeland: Linda hasn’t waffled on tax increases. She’s been clear in her long career of writing that she would raise tax rates as high as 60% and 70% for people in Toronto Centre. It’s certainly the right time to put a price on our carbon emissions, but we need to ensure that instead of raising taxes on Canadians, as Linda and the NDP have proposed, we need to emphasize growth and job creation when formulating our economic policy. Anemic growth and raising taxes is not the answer. I have knocked on thousands of doors in recent months and I have never heard anyone tell me that they want a tax increase. I think one of the biggest things that separate us from the NDP is their insistence on the need to raise taxes.

Corcoran: After weeks of campaigning in the riding, what have you identified as the single most important issue to voters, as opposed to what you think the issues are? And what’s you’re policy on that issue?

McQuaig: There’s no question that the most important issue to voters in downtown Toronto is the housing crisis. With 165,000 people on the waiting list for affordable housing, this is an acute situation that people tell me about in very emotional terms at the door. We used to have a very effective national housing program that was responsible for much of the housing in downtown Toronto today. The program was killed in 1995 by the Liberals. The impact has been homelessness and deepening poverty in the riding. We’ve got to create a new national housing strategy if we want to keep this city vibrant and diverse.

Freeland: The issue I hear about at the door from an overwhelming number of voters is the need for us to upgrade, build and invest in our transit infrastructure. The need to move safely and more easily around the city is, after all, a quality of life issue. It’s a question of how much time we are able to spend with our families versus travelling between home and work. We need a national transit strategy. We need to invest now in order to create jobs and ensure our city can address the needs of a growing population — a rate of over 100,000 people moving to Toronto each year.

Corcoran: The Toronto Centre by-election was widely billed as a head-to-head battle between two of Canada’s leading economic policy columnists. But live politics is a game of compromise with public opinion and party policy, while armchair column writing is mostly unplugged personal opinion. How are you handling the transition from freedom to a say-this-and-don’t-say-that controlled environment?

McQuaig: True, it has been an adjustment to go from total arm-chair freedom to being part of a team. When you’re running with a political party, you’re part of a team that works out issues collectively. But at the same time, my views line up closely with the NDP, which is the only major progressive party in Canada. Yes, I’ve given up being a lone-wolf, but I’ve gained the prospect of actually making a difference in the political sphere. Terry, maybe you should give it try.

Corcoran: Linda, if you win on Monday, I will do that. As a resident of Toronto Centre, on Tuesday I will begin assembling a campaign team to take you on directly in 2015.

Freeland: I think that I’ve been very lucky, in that I agree with the policies of my party. It is Justin Trudeau’s focus on the squeeze of the middle class that attracted me to run in the first place. A central part of his vision for this country is that we need to grow the middle class from the inside out. Justin has always been supportive of my economic views. In fact, Justin has asked me to be a Co-Chair of the Liberal Party’s Economic Council of Advisors and I will be writing our party’s economic policy as we move towards 2015.

Corcoran: Getting voters out for a by-election is notoriously difficult, but the Rob Ford meltdown has diverted political and media energy toward city politics. There’s been almost no coverage. How much of a distraction has the Ford fiasco been? Has it worked to your advantage?

McQuaig: Actually, we’ve had quite a lot of coverage. But of course, it’s hard to compete with the daily revelations of the Ford circus.

Freeland: Rob Ford has certainly captured the headlines and some people do want to talk about him. Having said that, both the tragic comedy at City Hall and the continuing revelations about the Senate have been winning people over to the longstanding Liberal campaign for a positive approach to politics that puts people and their needs ahead of game-playing and name-calling. Now more than ever, people in Toronto Centre are looking for leaders who offer a positive vision of democracy and the role each one of us plays in it.

OTTAWA — A high-profile federal Liberal candidate campaigning in Toronto on a platform of restoring the middle class oversaw the decision to move two dozen full-time media jobs from that city to India.

Chrystia Freeland was the head of Reuters Digital in New York when Thomson Reuters moved its Toronto digital newsroom to New York and shipped the bulk of its work to the Bangalore operation.

The December 2011 move put about 25 Toronto staff under Freeland’s supervision out of work, including 17 permanent and five temporary unionized employees. Thomson Reuters won’t say how many employees remain — only that the company has “a fully staffed and functioning newsroom in Toronto.”

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“Ever since I’ve been an editor at different news organizations, legacy newsrooms have been shrinking, and that was something that happened as well when I was at Reuters,” Freeland said in an interview.

“That shrinkage started before I got there and has continued (since she left). We know that is something that’s happening to the news business.”

Now Freeland is a star Liberal candidate campaigning for a seat in the House of Commons in Toronto Centre, one of four federal byelections to be decided by voters on Nov. 25.

Matthew Sherwood for National Post // Tyler Anderson / National PostLiberal candidate Chrystia Freeland, left, will go up against fellow author Linda McQuaig, right, who won the NDP nomination on the first ballot in September.

And a big part of her campaign pitch is the restoration of Canada’s economic middle class.

“Liberals know that if we don’t address this growing anxiety today, Canadians will stop supporting a growth agenda — a threat to a core Canadian ideal that prosperity is a realistic goal for all Canadians,” states Freeland’s campaign website, under the heading “The Liberal Middle Class Priority.”

“The time for investing in a thriving middle class is now — make your voice heard in Ottawa.”

The seeming disconnect between Freeland’s recent corporate role and her campaign message has a number of her former employees seething.

Multiple sources from the defunct Toronto digital operation spoke to The Canadian Press, but few wanted to comment on the record for fear that criticizing the well-connected Freeland could hurt their employment prospects in a shrinking media industry.

A common refrain from former Reuters employees is a sense that Freeland didn’t go to bat for them when their jobs were on the line.

Aviva West spent three years as a full-time, contract editor who worked every weekend at the Toronto operation.

“We had zero contact with (Freeland),” said West.

Campaigning for the middle class is just so hypocritical

“She was in charge of consumer news, and that’s what we were doing in Toronto, programming 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Reuters.com. We never, ever saw her.”

“We wanted to show her what we did because we worked really hard on this site, we loved our jobs and we wanted to show her the value that we added to the company,” said West. “But we never got that chance.”

Said another former editor, who requested anonymity to protect her future employment prospects, “Campaigning for the middle class is just so hypocritical.”

Whether Freeland should wear the scars of an industry-wide downturn will be a matter of debate.

“I can confirm that the decision was not Chrystia Freeland’s,” Barb Burg, Reuters global head of communications, said in an email.

“It was a corporate one that resulted from extensive financial review and changing customer needs.”

A senior source with knowledge of the decision-making process put it this way: “It was a corporate decision that she executed.”

Freeland published a book last year, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. When asked if the Reuters experience influenced her writing, she said it did.

“In the same way that Windsor autoworkers were in the centre of the downsizing of manufacturing, I think we as journalists have been in the centre of this creative destruction, the technology revolution….

“Definitely, seeing that has made me particularly sensitive to the ways the technology revolution has been changing work and the jobs that are available.”

Outsourcing parts of news organizations has become common practice across North America in the past decade as media profit margins have been erased by the collapse of advertising revenue.

The Canadian Press, for instance, has a wholly owned subsidiary, Pagemasters North America, which provides outsourced editorial production services by unionized staff in Canada and the United States. Postmedia Editorial Services also outsources “whole-process pagination solutions to daily newspapers across America” from its central hub in Hamilton.

“Anyone who’s been a news manager, every editor in the period that I was, has been an editor when the organization they were working for was downsizing the newsroom,” said Freeland.

Stand by for more of the sameChrystia Freeland, the Liberal candidate in the Toronto Centre by-election, talks to the Toronto Star‘s Tim Harper about Justin Trudeau’s I-admire-Chinese-governance gaffe. “I want to have politicians who can speak with some degree of openness allowed in public and think thoughts in public and speak not just in pre-poll tested sound bites,” she argues, gamely. “‘Brilliant musings’ will go unreported in today’s news cycle, she says, but the hammer comes down when one stumbles.” Uh huh. Listen, if Trudeau’s office wants to pass along any of his unpublished “brilliant musings,” we’ll be happy to note them in tomorrow’s Full Pundit.

Pondering Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s latest fiscal update, the National Post‘s John Ivison concludes it’s business as usual for Stephen Harper and his Conservatives. (You didn’t expect them to change, did you?) They will “cut taxes and drain the pool of revenue available to the opposition to fund their own spending commitments,” Ivison predicts, and then “challenge” the Liberals and New Democrats: “repeal our tax cuts or raise money by imposing your own tax hikes.” Ivison suggests we “ask Stéphane Dion how that movie ends.”

In that sense, Tasha Kheiriddin argues at iPolitics, income splitting — which the Tories have long promised to implement once the budget is balanced — is something of a perfect policy. It will cost the treasury a fair whack of dough, thus depriving the opposition of spending opportunities; it “plays directly to the demographic Holy Grail all parties are chasing in the next election: middle class families”; and as such, it puts the Liberals and New Democrats in something of a bind as to how best to oppose it.

TheGlobe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson argues that the costs of demanding tourist visas from Mexican citizens — a marked decline in business and tourist travel, and a finger in the eye of a key trading partner — far outweigh the benefits of halting the flow of what he calls “bogus refugee claimants.” It’s not entirely clear how Simpson is measuring these costs and benefits, but in any event he wants Stephen Harper to “announce the end of the visas” when he visits Mexico in February.

Smoke ‘em while you still canWe are shocked to learn from the Post‘s Brian Hutchinson that people actually still smoke tobaccoin Vancouver. And not even just in the suburbs — like, downtown! Anyway, sooner than round these filthy people up and send them to re-education camps, the city is installing butt-recycling containers. It sounds to Hutchinson like a “dubious and cost-intensive” business proposition. But it did at least yield an entertaining scene: An official assured reporters that adequate supplies of partially smoked cigarettes would remain on the sidewalks for homeless people to finish, which is hilariously weird, considering it basically concedes the project won’t work. And when it came time to demonstrate how the recycling bins worked, of course, none of the clean-living officials on hand had a cigarette, and so the deputy city manager had to fish one out of the soggy gutter.

Sun Media’s Lorne Gunter, meanwhile, thinks Alberta’s proposed ban on smoking in cars with children is an exercise in “mostly useless symbolism” — he says that like it’s a bad thing! — and argues “it would be better that a thousand additional Albertans took up smoking each year than that Alison Redford’s poke-nose Tories tried to outlaw yet another activity that upsets their moralistic, puritanical instincts.”

Duly notedIn the Montreal Gazette, Peggy Currancalls out Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre for calling out the Montreal Canadiens’ David Desharnais for his poor play. “Being the city’s biggest booster is part of the job description,” she argues. “You don’t do that by singling out a player for scorn and antagonizing the team” — especially when we’re talking about, wait for it, “one of the Canadiens’ handful of francophone players.” Sigh. There was a time we would have used that remark to make fun of Quebec’s bizarre politics. But with Toronto City Council on in the background as we write this, that would be decidedly inappropriate.

Four federal by-elections have been called for Nov. 25th, including in Toronto Centre. While a new poll shows the Liberals comfortably ahead, I think it’s going to be a real battle. And so does NDP candidate Linda McQuaig, judging by the gambit she launched this weekend.

McQuaig is challenging Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland to a one-on-one debate on income inequality, a topic they’ve both written about at some length. Such a debate would exclude every other party running in this election, such as the Green Party and, oh yeah, the folks with a majority government that are running the country, the Conservatives.

Of course, the idea of excluding major parties for more limited debates isn’t new. In 2008, the NDP and Conservatives teamed-up to bar Green Party Elizabeth May from the leaders debate. After pressure from the Liberals and Canadian citizens, the NDP and leader Jack Layton backed down, and the Greens were included.

McQuaig isn’t talking about excluding the other parties she must not consider contenders from all debates though, apparently. Just from this one.

Of course, an additional debate of just two so-called front-runners isn’t a new idea either. In the 2011 election, Stephen Harper challenged then Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff to a one-on-one debate that would have excluded the NDP’s Layton. Ignatieff quickly accepted the challenge; Harper then quickly changed his mind — he wanted it to replace all leaders debates. And that obviously wasn’t on.

In retrospect, such a debate would have been rather arrogant and exclusionary, as fun as it all was at the time. The voters like to decide for themselves among all the candidates though, as the results of that election (vaulting the NDP into the official opposition) would show.

Which brings us back to Layton. What would he have to say about having a separate one-on-one debate that doesn’t include other parties, as McQuaig is seeking to do in Toronto-Centre? Well, we know what he had to say about it in 2011:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joZmDTX5CNc&w=640&h=390]

Layton called this idea an “anti-democratic approach” the he didn’t think was right or would be accepted by Canadians. He noted it “prejudges the position of Canadians” and compared it to American-style politics. So Layton, clearly, would have a problem with what the NDP is proposing in Toronto-Centre.

One has to wonder if McQuaig ran this by new NDP leader Tom Mulcair. And one also has to wonder what McQuaig and Freeland would debate, as most of McQuaig’s ideas on the topic have been soundly and publicly disavowed by Mulcair as unrepresentative of the party’s position.

When I come to Toronto, I don’t pay any attention to which electoral constituency I am in. Scarborough Rouge River or Scarborough Agincourt? Who cares?

But this time it seemed important that I was in Toronto Centre, the federal riding recently vacated by Bob Rae, and therefore due for a byelection in the near future. It has a history of rather distinguished representatives — before Rae, there was the previous interim Liberal leader, Bill Graham, and before him David Crombie, a man many think was twice the mayor Rob Ford is, even though literally half the size.

There is unusual excitement about the upcoming Toronto Centre byelection — unusual because there is excitement. The Tory candidate is a solid citizen, Geoff Pollock, but few expect the Conservatives to pick up the seat. So the attention is on the two star candidates, the Liberals’ Chrystia Freeland and the NDP’s Linda McQuaig. Authors of economic books, the race is being billed a rare contest between articulate advocates of serious policy reform.

With Freeland, that remains to be seen. A resident of New York City, Freeland’s book Plutocrats more points to a phenomenon — the rise of the super-rich — rather than proposes plausible policy responses. There is no such mystery with McQuaig, whose economic ideas and prescriptions are crystal clear. For decades she has railed against the “neo-liberal” economic consensus shared by the Conservatives and the Liberals. It is slightly awkward that Tom Mulcair is trying to fudge any NDP dissent from that consensus, but at least with McQuaig there is the potential of a good argument.

Both Freeland and McQuaig speak to the growing economic anxiety among classes that, in previous generations, prospered in good economic times — professionals, college graduates, skilled service workers, skilled and unskilled labour, civil servants. Recent decades have seen stagnant real wages among those groups, with the exception of public-sector workers, whose income and benefits have kept them rather insulated. High government indebtedness, especially at the provincial level, is now threatening those workers too.

What is to be done about this is the great economic challenge of the next several generations. Everything that has produced a revolution in services, technology and retail for consumers also lays waste to the high-paid labour upon which so many middle-class families depended for historically high standards of living. When other factors are taken into account — the increasing need for and cost of post-secondary education, decreasing private- and public-sector pension provision, diminishing returns to savings due to low interest rates, the increasing health-care (drugs, non-covered services, nursing homes) costs for small families with elderly parents — the middle-class squeeze is all too real.

Linda McQuaig says the whole rotten international system needs to be torn down

The new economy does provide significant returns to the highly-skilled and highly-educated in certain sectors, but it seems unlikely that an entire workforce can become so skilled and so educated. Linda McQuaig says the whole rotten international system needs to be torn down, and Chrystia Freeland says the system may be rotten, and something should be done about it. Whatever the merits of the two positions, that such a critical economic issue would dominate a prominent federal byelection is welcome news.

I was in Toronto Centre last night for a dinner honouring Senator Hugh Segal, a Kingston friend who has ennobled Canadian public life for nearly 40 years, including his service in the Senate, which has been in recent need of ennobling.

Dave Chan / Postmedia NewsHugh Segal

Senator Segal has been, from the unlikely position of the Senate, one of the most creative voices on economic policy. There is much debate about poverty, and Andrew Coyne in these pages has shown that there is much good news on that front over the past 20 years. Segal knows that there are pockets of Canadian society in which poverty is stubbornly persistent. He tends to think that poverty causes consequent social dislocation, and I think the causality is likely reversed, but we do agree that the massive poverty alleviation bureaucracy of the Canadian welfare state is itself a burden — to the taxpayer and to those it is trying to help. It’s a spider web rather than a safety net, in Segal’s apt phrase.

Segal advocates for a guaranteed annual income, a policy that has friends on both the left and the right, but evidently very few in the centre of the economic policy consensus. But he has advanced good arguments about the afflicted among us for a long time, and that is worth saluting. A good argument about economics is too rare in Canada. A byelection here is a good time to have one.

Consumers first!Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt believes the composition of Justin Trudeau’s economic advisory panel, which includes Toronto Centre candidate Chrystia Freeland, signals the Liberals are after “a plan that is pro-growth, in particular pro middle-class real income growth, contains successful elements of 1990s liberalism — innovation, freer trade, balanced budgets — and does not raise anyone’s taxes.” That will be no mean feat, in his view. But he thinks the Conservatives’ forthcoming consumers-first agenda is evidence that they take Trudeau’s pitch for middle-class votes seriously.

In an excellent piece for TheGlobe and Mail, Brian Lee Crowley notes that the industries that Stephen Harper’s forthcoming pro-consumer agenda are likely to focus on — airlines, banks and telecommunications — “are already the beneficiaries of more regulatory attention by government than almost any other businesses,” and all “labour under one of the biggest regulatory handicaps of all: Foreign ownership rules that prevent non-Canadians from taking control.”

In coming months we are sure to hear much of “airline passenger bills of rights, capped roaming charges for mobile phones and a new code to protect consumers of financial services,” as Crowley says. But he suggests we instead follow Australia’s lead by “tearing down regulatory barriers and pursuing a single-minded policy of injecting genuine competition into previously protected industries” — not for ideology’s sake, but explicitly for consumers’.

Terry Glavin doesn’t often defer to “our hapless natural resources minister,” whom he wonderfully dubs “Calamity Joe Oliver,” but it is true, as Oliver has lately been pointing out, that coal burned in the United States “produces 20 to 50 times the greenhouse gas output of Alberta’s oilsands, and a quarter of the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions” — which makes it a bit odd, really, that the American environmental movement is so obsessed with our fabulous bitumen. Unfortunately, as Glavin says, is that Oliver spent “most of 2012 conjuring sinister plots by foreign-funded environmental groups,” so no one takes him seriously; and environmentalists insist on hauling out morons like Neil Young and Robert Redford, so no one takes them seriously; and we are left, as ever, with “paralysis.”

Notes on a tragedyJean-Robet Sansfaçon, writing in Le Devoir, uses the tragic occasion of a bus running into a train at a perfectly functional level crossing near Ottawa to attack the railway industry, its shareholders and government enablers for prioritizing profitability above safety. Doesn’t make much sense to us at all.

Derek Abma, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, ruminates on the reasons why the six deaths in Barrhaven seem to rattle us so much more than the “29 people [who] were killed in traffic accidents in Ottawa last year.” He suggests it’s because we manage risk by performing little routines — “we exercise, eat the right foods, drive safely, buckle our seatbelts, look both ways before crossing the street” — and we like to believe it gives us control. But when we put our lives in the hands of a bus driver, there isn’t even the illusion of control.

The man who would be PremierOntario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak speaks to the Globe‘s Adam Radwanski of the perils of trying to drag a once-dominant political party back to power, which in his case include annoying MPPs trying to undermine his leadership when there could be an election at any time. He also complains that he often hears at the same town hall meeting “that we don’t have enough policy and that we have too much policy; that we’re too conservative and not conservative enough.” We would politely suggest that this is largely Hudak’s fault: Over the course of his leadership he has tried to play both roles, leaving voters with little idea of what he actually stands for.

The National Post‘s Scott Stinson is less interested in the leadership review Hudak faces than in which of the quite controversial ideas he has put forward in his various white papers —”unions would be busted, the public service would shrink, and anything not nailed down would be sold,” as Stinson puts it — will actually become party policy. They will, after all, be the focus of withering attacks from the opposition in the next campaign, and Ontarians, as we know, fear change.

Duly notedIn La Presse, Alain Dubuc parses the data from this week’s CROP poll and notes that nearly half of the Parti Québécois base is apparently now “concentrated among traditional Catholics,” the “less urban” and the “less educated,” 74% of whom “have a negative perception of immigration.” Basically, Pauline Marois turned the party of René Lévesque into the party of Mario Dumont. (Bravo, madame.) Dubuc also thinks it a bit odd to hear Jean-François Lisée crowing about support for the PQ’s values charter in the Rest of Canada, considering that it’s most popular among Conservative voters. Considering how often Marois and her ministers declare “that the values embodied by the Harper government [are] incompatible with those of Quebec,” he thinks Lisée should be more worried than jubilant.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-canadian-consumers-need-more-competition-not-more-regulation/feed/0stdProtesters march from St. James Park to Dundas Square as part of the Occupy Toronto movement on Sunday.Michael Den Tandt: Trudeau's team offers a glimpse of the brain behind the hairhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/michael-den-tandt-trudeaus-team-offers-a-glimpse-of-the-brain-behind-the-hair
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/michael-den-tandt-trudeaus-team-offers-a-glimpse-of-the-brain-behind-the-hair#commentsThu, 19 Sep 2013 19:57:11 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=129660

Why would people of substance, depth and intelligence place their fates in the hands of a leader who lacks all three? Perhaps they’ve been seduced, like so many others, by the glitter of celebrity. It might be the monarchical instinct, pulsing quietly away in their back-brains. It might be simple ambition, just because they think he’s a winner. Or possibly, there’s hypnosis at work.

These are the questions implicitly raised by the addition to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s team of two new players whose intellectual heft isn’t in question. That’s Harvard-educated journalist and author Chrystia Freeland, formerly the Financial Times’ U.S. editor and now Liberal candidate in Toronto Centre; and retired Army commander General Andrew Leslie. Both are new senior advisers to Trudeau, charged with guiding the development of Liberal policy, alongside two of the party’s MPs, Scott Brison and Marc Garneau.

What this begins to do – though it is early days – is disrupt the narrative of Trudeau as insubstantial and, therefore, unfit to lead. There is more to follow, as the Grits fashion, they hope, their very own Arthurian legend. There will be further additions to the Round Table. But it is clear already that Trudeau’s opponents understand they must adapt, by moving beyond the simply personal. We can see this in the federal government’s newfound zeal for consumer protection, expected to be a centerpiece of next month’s Throne Speech.

Twitter reacted grumpily to Freeland’s appointment Tuesday as co-chair, with Brison, of Trudeau’s “council of economic advisers.” What could a mere business journalist, successful though she may be, provide that veterans such as John McCallum, a PhD in economics, or Ralph Goodale, a former minister of finance, could not? What’s so special about Freeland that would cause her to be elevated in this way even before she’s won a seat in the House of Commons?

I briefly worked with Freeland a decade ago. She is a good editor. But that’s not why she’s now a key figure in the Liberal party. It’s all about her 2012 non-fiction book, Plutocrats, in which she describes – but does not purport to remedy – the global rise in inequality over the past 20 years, characterized by much greater gaps between the wealthiest 0.1 per cent (that’s one tenth of one per cent, for all you Occupiers) and everyone else. It’s a phenomenon she calls “the second Gilded Age.”

What’s interesting about the book – and what distinguishes it from examinations of the same topic by Toronto Centre NDP candidate Linda McQuaig – is that it approaches inequality from a pro-market perspective. Freeland self-identifies as a “capitalist, red in tooth and claw,” who believes inequality must be addressed, not because plutocrats are necessarily evil and the poor necessarily virtuous, but because capitalism historically has collapsed – most notably in Russia, in 1917 – when the rich grow too rich, and the rest too poor. It’s an echo of a line in Trudeau’s leadership stump speech, restated in an op-ed in the Hamilton Spectator last November: “If we do not attend to this problem, we should not be surprised to see the middle class question the policies, and the very system, that values and encourages growth.”

The difficulty – and the reason, I think, why Trudeau has refused, thus far, to offer up any remedies, is that it’s a very complex problem to solve, if soaking the rich, McQuaig’s preferred solution, is off the table. The Liberals’ great challenge is to devise a plan that is pro-growth, in particular pro middle-class real income growth, contains successful elements of 1990s liberalism — innovation, freer trade, balanced budgets — and does not raise anyone’s taxes. If they can do it, and make it appealing, it will be a trick worthy of Houdini. What is clear, now, is that they intend to try.

Once again, the combatants converge on the centre

The Conservatives view this, rightly, as potentially a greater threat than Trudeau’s hair. It is no surprise, therefore, to hear Industry Minister James Moore asserting consumers are now central to the government’s agenda. Who knew? That says this: You can’t have the middle class, Justin — they belong to us. Thomas Mulcair, at his party’s recent caucus in Saskatoon, signaled he now covets the same turf. So, once again, the combatants converge on the centre. To the extent elections are about policy (alongside leadership, ground games and luck) the next campaign will turn on this fulcrum of the middle class — just as Trudeau and a few close advisers envisioned in the spring and summer of 2012, before they launched his leadership bid.

Do foresight, good instincts and a knack for driving debate constitute intellectual substance? With people such as Freeland and Leslie in the mix, that question becomes less apt than it might have been, say, a week ago. But this is really just the start. As the “middle class” debate gets rolling and new voices join the fray, Trudeau himself becomes less singularly important. This, too, I am told, is by design – and I would venture, further evidence of the brain behind the grin.

Linda McQuaig is smart, charismatic, tough, steeped in economic critique, and one of a very few well-known public intellectuals of the Canadian left. As such she should be an ideal standard-bearer for NDP leader Tom Mulcair in the bellwether riding of Toronto Centre, where the New Democrats face a Liberal candidate, Chrystia Freeland, who is also smart, also charming, also an economics wonk, and also has written extensively about income inequality. It’s like a set piece in chess, or a Victorian duel: Two rivals face each other across a field at dawn, holding matched flintlocks. Let the better woman win.

Except for this: From Mulcair’s point of view — that of a still-new leader, parachuted in from Quebec’s provincial Liberals, and confronted with the tricky task of shoving his left-leaning partisans towards the pragmatic centre — there could not be a more problematic candidate than McQuaig. Indeed, it would be better for Mulcair now if his party loses this by-election, which has yet to be called.

That’s because, throughout her lengthy career as an author and activist, McQuaig has consistently repudiated the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that Mulcair insists he and his party now accept. Across a span of 30 years she has not budged. Nor is she someone likely to be cowed by party discipline. Yet she is too well known and admired on the left to be sidelined. The moment McQuaig is elected, therefore —­ if she’s elected —­ she becomes a problem for her leader to manage, if not an implicit threat to his leadership.

It was McQuaig who, 20 years ago, became the standard-bearer for nationalists and statists across Canada who believed the Liberal party of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin had sold out to Bay Street carpetbaggers and fat cats when they stole the Reform Party’s fiscal-conservative mantra without a sideward glance, and adopted the defeated Mulroney government’s North American free-trade agenda as their own.

This was not what the Liberals had campaigned on in 1993. But Martin had become convinced the country could only get back to measured growth amid low inflation, if Ottawa first got back to balance. Mulroney’s reviled GST, the greatest budgetary golden goose ever devised, had made that possible. And so did the painful cuts to transfer payments, and the military budget, that began in earnest in 1995. By 1997 the federal deficit was history. In 2000 Martin delivered the biggest multi-year income-tax reduction in Canadian history, clinching the Chretien Liberals’ third majority.

That narrative is so hoary now, it’s like one of Grimm’s fairy tales. The reasons it’s germane here is that McQuaig was squarely on the wrong side of the argument. She minimized deficit reduction and pooh-poohed inflation, alleging the entire fiscal crisis was an ideological construct of Bay Street, and the early-90s recession an all-but deliberate creation of then-governor of the Bank of Canada John Crow. As for higher taxes, not only were they not a bad thing, they were a mark of high social virtue.

Liam Richards / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Mulcair, you will have noticed, is no a fan of tax increases — at least not for individuals who, unlike corporations, each get a vote. Everywhere he goes lately, he’s asked if he’ll boost tax rates on upper income earners. His answer: No. “Several provinces are already at the 50% rate,” Mulcair told the St. John’s Telegram in August. “Beyond that, you’re not talking taxation, you’re talking confiscation. And that is never going to be part of my policies, going after more individual taxes. Period. Full stop.”

McQuaig has no qualms about confiscation. Among the most intriguing aspects of her work is how very little her views have changed since the wooly 90s. Some passages in her 2010 book with Neil Brooks, The Trouble With Billionaires, might as well have been taken verbatim from her 1995 bestseller, Shooting the Hippo.

Among the gems proposed in Billionaires: A 60% tax rate on incomes above $500,000, and 70% above $2.5-million. The government, in a McQuaig-ordered universe, would seize 70% of any large inheritance (above $50-million) at the time of transfer. In effect that would wipe out every large Canadian fortune. All that would be needed to prevent a flight of capital overseas, McQuaig figures, is a crackdown on overseas tax havens. As for a brain drain, she’s not worried about it. “Of course some people will leave, people are always leaving,” she told interviewer Alan Gregg in 2010.

“The neo-conservative movement has been successful in directing public anger towards taxes,” McQuaig writes in the book’s closing pages. “It will only be possible to rebuild a properly progressive tax system once the neo-conservative misconceptions are exposed and an appreciation of the importance of taxation in a democracy is restored.” Ah. Well then.

These are subjects worthy of debate. But they’re not debates Tom Mulcair wants to have just now. Simply, for McQuaig to thrive in politics, rather than as Canada’s answer to Noam Chomsky, she will need to change her mind. That’s not something she’s done before.

Both the Liberals and NDP have selected veteran journalists to represent them in what will be one of the country’s most highly anticipated byelections.

Former Financial Times and Globe and Mail journalist Chrystia Freeland won the Liberal party nomination in the riding of Toronto Centre, while Linda McQuaig, an author and former Globe and Toronto Star columnist, will be the NDP’s candidate.

Tyler Anderson / National PostLinda McQuaig poses for a portrait in Regent Park in Toronto.

Holding nomination meetings just hours apart from each other, the parties released their ballot results Sunday evening.

Ms. McQuaig placed first ahead of Jennifer Hollett, also a journalist and former MuchMusic VJ, and well-known community activist Susan Gapka, who came third.

In her speech at the Liberal nomination meeting, Ms. Freeland talked up Toronto as “an exciting, dynamic, sexy city” and said her goal was to put an end to the Harper government and its “reheated ideological leftovers.”

We’ve come home because Canada is at a tipping point

“The good news is this country is sick and tired of that,” she said. “We are better than that and we are smarter than that and we know it.”

Originally from Northern Alberta, Ms. Freeland, 42, is a former journalist and the author of two books. She, her husband, and their three daughters recently returned to Toronto from New York City where she worked for Thomson Reuters as a director and managing editor.

Matthew Sherwood for National PostChrystia Freeland poses for a photograph near Dundas Square in Toronto.

“We’ve come home because Canada is at a tipping point,” said Ms. Freeland.

Born and raised in Canada, Ms. McQuaig is a long-time resident of Toronto Centre. She has written seven national best-selling books and her platform will focus on affordable housing, climate change, tuition for youth and income inequality.
Ms. McQuaig also spoke out against the Harper government, calling it “the worst government we’ve ever had in this country.”

Ms. Freeland has widely been seen as Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s favoured Candidate for Toronto Centre, though the race was an open one. Her book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, revolves around middle-class advocacy, the foundation which Mr. Trudeau’s platform will rest on for the next federal election.

No date has been set for the byelection it could come as early as October.

The Toronto Centre riding has been a Liberal stronghold since 1993 and encompasses Toronto’s most diverse communities including Rosedale, Regent Park, and the Gay Village. Whoever wins this byelection will play a huge factor in which party wins the federal election.

Ms. Freeland has also received the backing of former health minister George Smitherman, who many thought would replace Toronto Centre MP Bob Rae when he retired in June.

“This is the genuine article. She’s a woman of conviction of passion experience and values that are for our Liberals,” said Mr. Smitherman at the nomination meeting. “It’s Freeland today and for our tomorrow.”

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/liberals-choose-chrystia-freeland-to-face-ndp-candidate-linda-mcquaig-in-upcoming-byelection-in-toronto-centre/feed/3stdLiberal candidate Chrystia Freeland, left, will go up against fellow author Linda McQuaig, right, who won the NDP nomination on the first ballot in September.Tyler Anderson / National PostMatthew Sherwood for National PostFight for Bob Rae's vacated seat shaping up to be a bellwether between Trudeau and Mulcairhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/toronto-centre-byelection
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/toronto-centre-byelection#commentsFri, 13 Sep 2013 23:01:13 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=363813

In the shadow of a digital billboard, amid the cacophony of street corner preachers and streetcars and skateboards of Dundas Square, Chrystia Freeland pumps her arms as she runs to make the lights.

She used the city’s bike share to get here, the venerable Imperial Pub, to attend a “Young Liberals” launch night. The campaign was accidentally told the wrong location, so she left without entering, but first slipped out of her sneakers and into towering black patent heels for a photo shoot.

Although she blends into the crowds at one of the busiest intersections in the city, Ms. Freeland, a prominent author and journalist who had been living in New York City until recently, is a commanding presence who has brought some star power to the race to fill Bob Rae’s well-worn shoes. With provocative left-wing journalist and writer Linda McQuaig vying for the NDP nomination, the still uncalled byelection in Toronto Centre could have the makings of a political junkie’s thrill ride.

Matthew Sherwood for National PostChrystia Freeland poses for a photograph near Dundas Square in Toronto.

Ms. Freeland, 45, and Ms. McQuaig, 62, must first clinch their parties’ respective nominations at meetings held this weekend — and despite the buzz, neither claims to be a shoo in.

Todd Ross, a long-time community leader, and Diana Burke, a retired bank executive and seasoned Grit organizer, are also vying for the Liberal nod, while former journalist and Much Music VJ Jennifer Hollett and well known local activist Susan Gapka are seeking to represent the NDP. This week, the Green Party announced it, too, had found a media candidate: former Toronto Star columnist John Deverell. The Conservative riding association did not respond to questions about the party’s candidate.

Toronto Centre is a traditional Liberal stronghold, picked up by Bill Graham in 1993 and held on to by Bob Rae, until his retirement.

Ms. Hollett, 37, calls the riding a “postcard of Canada” — alongside some of the richest neighbourhoods in the city are Regent Park and the gay village. The boundaries will be redrawn for the next general election in 2015, but this interim contest could be a bellwether on the appeal of NDP leader Thomas Mulcair versus Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, argues Ms. McQuaig, who has lived in the riding for 13 years.

This will be a ground war for both the Liberals and the NDP

“This will be a ground war for both the Liberals and the NDP and the work is knocking on the doors,” agreed Ms. Hollett, who has a Masters in public administration from Harvard. “[Voters] want someone who has expertise, but they also want someone who knows the neighbourhood and who has experienced some of these issues first hand.”

Ms. McQuaig says affordable housing would be a key issue for her, given the high number of renters, along with the broader issues of income disparity, which she has chronicled throughout her career.

In her 2010 book, The Trouble with Billionaires: How the Super Rich Hijacked the World and How We Can Take it Back, Ms. McQuaig and her co-author, professor Neil Brooks, call for a new tax rate of 60% for incomes over $500,000 and 70% for incomes above $2.5-million. If she were to get to Ottawa, that’s something she would advocate for, although she says she is not wed to the specific amounts.

Tyler Anderson / National PostLinda McQuaig poses for a portrait in Regent Park in Toronto.

Interestingly, Ms. Freeland probed the same subject in her 2012 tome, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Ms. McQuaig contends they have different takes, and she seems to relish the prospect of debating her. “It’s a recipe for the status quo,” said Ms. McQuaig of Ms. Freeland’s argument. “This strikes me to be kind of what the Trudeau campaign is going to be all about — you champion the middle class but when you get right into it, there’s really no substance to it. There’s just more of the same.”

Ms. Freeland declines to respond to questions about Ms. McQuaig. “My focus right now is 100% on the Liberal nomination. I haven’t been, and I think it would be premature and wrong, to look beyond that,” she said.

Born in Peace River, Alberta, she studied at Harvard, earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University and went on to a career as a journalist in the Ukraine, London, Moscow and beyond. She has held senior posts at The Globe and Mail, the Financial Times, and most recently Thomson Reuters.

Tim Fraser for National PostJustin Trudeau helps out then-Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman in Toronto on Oct. 18, 2010

Her entry into the race was a surprise to say the least, since many assumed, correctly, that former provincial health minister George Smitherman wanted the nod. He has since endorsed Ms. Freeland, whose turn into the Trudeau Liberal circles began last year, when she met the leader at a book party for her in Toronto. Once Bob Rae stepped down, Ms. Freeland says Mr. Trudeau delivered a compelling pitch.

“He said, ‘look, have the courage of your convictions … It’s an open nomination, so you’ll have to fight for it, but I think that if you get through, you could really make a big difference in our efforts and make a big difference in Canada.'”

Despite the number of Trudeau backers working on Ms. Freeland’s campaign, Mr. Ross and Ms. Burke say they believe the Liberal leader when he says the nomination process is an open one. “In a sense I have the advantage that I’ve been on the ground, I think,” said Mr. Ross, 44, a former assistant to Mr. Smitherman.

Ms. Burke, a 62-year-old Jamaican immigrant who has lived the last 25 years in Toronto Centre, says she wished the media would have given the other candidates as much attention, but she attributes that to Ms. Freeland’s deep ties to the press.

Ms. Freeland points to her extensive work trying to understand what it is that is producing a huge disparity between the winners and the losers in the 21st Century economy as key to how she could help the country.

“I think we’re living in a time of economic transformation comparable in its scale and scope to the industrial revolution,” she said in an interview. “I’ve done a lot of intellectual work on it, and also, importantly, I have worked with a lot of the people around the world, both in government and the policy world, who are the leading thinkers for this issue. And I think it’s really important for our discussion of these sorts of things in Canada to be plugged in to the global discussion.” She adds later: “We have to find a solution that is a market friendly solution, a solution that allows capitalism to flourish. And by the way, that’s not impossible.”

How about a riding smack in the centre of the universe, which to Canadian media –other than those huddled around the sub-branch in Ottawa — means Toronto. Specifically, downtown Toronto. The place you can see from your office window. The place where everything important happens.

The riding of Toronto Centre had already attracted considerable attention for the fact that two well-known media personalities, pundit extraordinaire Chrystia Freeland and the Toronto Star’s Linda McQuaig, were both seeking to contest it in an anticipated byelection. McQuaig for the New Democrats (of course) and Freeland for the Liberals (who else?)

There must be something in the water around Toronto newsrooms, however, because now a third journalist has taken up the cudgels, thrown his hat in the ring, and all those other electoral cliches that have littered political reporting for generations. This time it’s John Deverell, a former Toronto Star reporter with a respected record as a labour reporter, political writer and former president of the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild.

Deverell will contest the riding for the Green Party, according to the Star, which must be starting to worry about newsroom depopulation. If anyone else from the Star runs for office — especially if the paper could somehow stumble on a conservative hidden away in the library stacks — it might have to recuse itself from covering the race on the basis of conflict of interest.

Though Deverell spent 25 years at the Liberal Star, and formally joined the party in 2011, he switched to the Greens due to its support for proportional representation, the only means by which the party can hope to quickly win more seats in parliament.

“I am thrilled that John Deverell has chosen to join us and work with the Green Party to rid this country of the perverse system of voting called First Past the Post (FPTP),” said Green leader, and only elected MP, Elizabeth May. “Only FPTP would allow a minority of voters to create a majority government. We need to make sure every vote counts.”. (Actually, proportional representation allows all sorts of electoral perversities, such as the Greek government, the Italian government and many of the other dysfunctional governments across Europe, not to mention the fact the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party will have a big say in the fate of Australia’s contentious carbon tax. But we won’t get into that.)

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So voters have a clear choice: a former Star reporter versus a former Globe and Mail editor, versus a current Star columnist. Unless the Tories can talk David Frum into running, the Tories probably won’t be a factor in the race. The Liberals and NDP will choose their candidate this weekend; Mr. Deverell won’t face a challenger.

So is this just a major coincidence, or does it matter that Toronto Centre seems to appeal so deeply to the soul of the archetypal Toronto media practitioner? The CBC (and why isn’t it in the race?) identifies Toronto Centre as “the quintessential downtown riding.” It has lots of rich people in Rosedale, lots of poor people in Regent Park and St. Jamestown, tons of immigrants, the country’s biggest gay community and even a bit of the Bay Street financial district and the University of Toronto thrown in for fun. Its eastern border skirts the Ontario legislature at Queen’s Park, meaning the MP gets to lord it over all those lesser souls in the provincial government, at least figuratively.

What Toronto media type wouldn’t want to represent it? It’s like the city’s view of Canada as a whole, extending all the way from one side of Yonge Street to the other. You can walk there from the office, and get home by subway. Conservatives are frowned on, although it’s acceptable to strike up a conversation with one at the leash-free dog park, if there’s absolutely no one else available. Since 1993 it’s been the exclusive preserve of Liberal party leadership stand-ins. First Bill Graham, who subbed for Paul Martin after Martin resigned, and more recently Bob Rae, who prepared the ground for the ascension of Justin Trudeau. Before that it was represented by David MacDonald and David Crombie, who were Progressive Conservatives in name but were judged OK because they were pretty liberal, for Tories. And Crombie, of course, was Toronto’s favourite ever mayor.

Perhaps best of all, there’s no long-term commitment. Journalists have notoriously short attention spans, and, happily, the winner will only have to serve two years before the next federal election, by which time Toronto Centre will have been carved up under a redistribution plan that will add 15 new seats to Ontario. The riding is scheduled to be split across the middle, leaving the rich at the top and the rest at the bottom. Which, on second thought, might work out well. Freeland, one half of a New York power couple and author of a well-received book on the super-rich, could have Rosedale, while McQuaig would feel comfy trying to revive the Occupy movement in the south end. That way people at The Star could vote for both of them.

Deverell? Maybe Elizabeth May can find him a seat in more Green-friendly B.C.